Managing Storage Through Layers

Storage has ceased to be a mere cost factor in the enterprise IT

infrastructure, and is viewed as a revenue enabler. The primary challenge before

solution partners and CIOs now, is to manage the entire storage architecture,

which, instead of having a small footprint, is varied and heterogeneous.

There is no doubt that information storage is given top priority amongst

enterprises, as it is a very potent tool for being competitive in today's

dynamic business environment. This has led to a tremendous explosion in demand

for storage infrastructure. While the importance of storage is undeniably

growing, enterprises are trying hard to transform storage from being viewed as a

cost component to the IT infrastructure, to a revenue generator.

The cost of storage technologies are declining daily. But the dominance of

fiber channel technology in the networked storage era has led to a situation

wherein the cost of manpower required to administer storage is escalating day by

day. And with shrinking IT budgets, storage administrators are finding it

increasingly difficult to meet the demands placed upon them while they try to

manage the storage infrastructure.

This has become a deterrent for enterprises in their efforts towards

transforming storage from a cost factor to a revenue enabler. Therefore, the

primary challenge before solution partners and CIOs is to manage the entire

storage architecture, which, instead of having a small footprint, has a varied

and heterogeneous footprint. This kind of a situation puts the performance of

business applications, and in turn the business, at risk.

WHY GO FOR SAM?



Storage Area Management (SAM) or consolidation of storage resources has

apparently evolved as a viable solution for addressing the above mentioned

challenges. However, not all SAM solutions address the problems faced by storage

administrators.

This is because, when considered from a business point of view SAM is all

about the quality of service. In a typical organization, storage administrators

have to manually manage the various elements of the storage infrastructure.

This may include file systems that are linked to the database, host bus

adopters, SAN fabric switches, the host server, the storage system itself and

the individual disk drive. The entire chain from drive to application has to be

linked. This is a labor intensive, error prone and slow process, which adds up

to delay and higher costs.

However, in today's scenario, businesses that are able to deliver high

levels of service easily will automatically reap benefits, whereas businesses

that cannot will be in trouble. For instance, when an application experiences

unexpected activity, it may not have the storage service that meets its

requirement. Consequently, performance and service deteriorates leading to

crashes and downtimes.

IMPLEMENTING SAM



While the implementation of a SAM practice seems the most obvious solution

in such a scenario, it is important for solution providers to recognize the

change and revisit the storage setup. It is because, if they have to effect

change, it has to be done not in months, but in a matter of hours.

They need to understand that the implementation of SAM should enable them to

manage the complex SAN infrastructures, storage resource management to address

process issues and storage provisioning to enable new applications to come

online quickly. In this manner, the SAM solution is able to deliver significant

TCO improvements and faster ROI.

However, in order to get the most out of a SAM implementation, it is

important to follow a layered model for storage management and the whole

industry is moving towards this. This type of a model relies on building layers

within the storage infrastructure and it is based on the industry wide standards

initiative - Common Information Model (CIM).

TO CIM OR NOT TO CIM



The CIM model enables management systems to recognize and exchange

information in a heterogeneous storage environment that houses different

solutions from various vendors. It offers a powerful foundation for

cross-platform SAM implementation.

Though the industry has not reached a consensus on the exact definition of

the layers, one model, which has identified four basic management layers is

slowly gaining prominence. The four layers comprise of reporting, path

management, event monitoring and automation control and they are addressed in

succession.

However all these four levels strongly depend upon the base level - discovery

- which serves as the building block for this model to work. It is because, at

the outset, organizations need to understand what storage resources they have

and where they are.

This is a very cumbersome process, which earlier used to comprise of reams of

spreadsheets, whiteboards and hand written notes. Ideally, a good SAM solution

should help administrators get a holistic perspective of all the elements

involved in a storage infrastructure right from the Logical Unit Number (LUN)

all the way to the application. And this has to be viewed from the application's

viewpoint.

This helps administrators to discover, track and locate the existing

resources and new resources that are being added into the storage

infrastructure. This apparently provides a very logical platform that can be

used to manage storage in a situation wherein enterprises prefer to build

storage infrastructures by sourcing different vendors.

BINDING ALL ELEMENTS TOGETHER



Once the solution provider discovers all the elements within the storage

system it is important for them to understand how the resources are being used.

This is because enterprises often resort to having buffer storage to meet

unforeseen circumstances, so that all mission-critical applications are

functional.

However, automated reporting and monitoring to determine what additional

resources are needed and when they are required comes out as a preferable

approach. From this viewpoint, the SAM solution should be able to optimize the

existing storage resources rather than rely on buffer storage capacity to keep

the applications up and running.

Hence, ideally, while addressing the reporting level in storage management,

the SAM solution should be able to provide an elemental overview across the

entire storage infrastructure so that they can continuously monitor storage from

LUN to the application. Further, complementing the comprehensive reporting and

monitoring functionality, the SAM solution should be able to provide

administrators with predictive management tools based on historic data so that

outages can be anticipated even before they happen and corrective actions can be

taken.

With such a reporting and monitoring system in place, partners can optimize

the existing usage resources and they can balance loads and shift excess

capacity from one server and application to another. This eliminates the need

for excess and "unnecessary" capacity, while existing

"excess" capacity and bandwidth are available elsewhere within the

existing infrastructure.

V Vivekanand is Sales

Director, SAM Solutions, APIA at Hitachi Data Systems

CHECKLIST FOR SAM IMPLEMENTATION